Why I Love My Job

If you've followed this blog closely you could be forgiven for thinking that I like my job here because it's easy. While I love the fact that it's a pretty straightforward 9 to 5 affair (i.e. no call or weekends) I wouldn't go so far as calling it easy. The patient load is lighter than what I'm used to but I'm kept pretty busy during the day as the people I do see are typically quite unwell.

The reasons I really love this job are a bit more complex. It's just so different than what I'm used to. For example, I was signed up for "mental health orientation" the other day. Given my experience with orientations in the past, I was less than enthusiastic about this as I searched for the meeting area ( an aside: I've noticed that directions here are typically much more vague than what I'm used to. For the orientation, I was given the date and the city, but not a time or specific location. The really weird thing is that these directions are usually enough to get you where you're going).

I eventually learned that the meeting area for orientation was on the sidewalk in front of the local marae, or Maori meeting house. We had to wait on the sidewalk because entering a marae is a formalized procedure. Let me stress that this isn't some tongue-in-cheek deal, either. What followed was a full-on Maori greeting ceremony complete with a haka (that's one of those greeting dances that looks pretty threatening; see the All Blacks post below). Sure enough, the guy leading the haka was acting rather agitated but everyone seemed quite welcoming once the haka was over. I say "seemed" because the first 45 minutes of the ceremony was held entirely in the Maori language (this wasn't the first meeting I'd been to where English was the second language). The meeting had quite the tribal feel to it as the men sat in rows directly opposed to one another while the women were seated on cushions behind us.

I think you'll understand me now when I say that this wasn't what I was expecting when I arrived for orientation. It was a hell of a lot more informative and interesting than any other orientation I've ever attended, and I finished the day with a much better understanding of my Maori and Pacific Islander patients.

Another reason I've enjoyed working here is that this country is far, far less litigious than the good 'ol U.S.A. Combine this fact with an incredibly underserved patient population, et voila- you've got a huge amount of autonomy on your hands. I don't spend much time second guessing myself here and I can do whatever I think is best for my patients. Someone's OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) is too severe for them to leave home? Grab their therapist, jump in the car, and visit them at home. Not sure if a hospitalized patient will be able to get by on the outside? Send them home over the weekend and see how it goes. It's not that I'm taking big risks with my patients, it's just that I now realize that I've never been able to take smaller ones.

I think I'm scheduled for fire safety training next. I had better go have a look at my life insurance policy...